brat, i hope i'm not mistaking due to your last sentence, but this is a Hong Kong that has been returned to China. albeit English is an important international communication language, shouldn't the focus be on how competent these teachers are in Chinese(both cantonese and mandarin) rather than an expat language?
imho, i'd much rather jump on, if there are any, ABC teachers who aren't fluent in any form of Chinese, teaching in any school in Hong Kong. with no regards to politics, a majority of this city's citizens are chinese, and chinese should be the mandatory language, not english.
similar to what saimei1962 said, maids of south asian descent often have a very different accent than ours, for example, many filipinos speak tagalog, and their english reflects that(not to mention some spanish, portuguese, and US english subtleties). it'd be hard pressed to find any english teacher in the world that can understand all english accents.
and perhaps a little nationalistic, but it's about time all those non-chinese speakers living in HK start learning some chinese, instead of us having to compensate for their laziness. i don't see vancouver public schools with over 60% chinese students forcing their anglophone teachers to have to be competent in chinese to teach english-taught subjects, nor their counsellor.
